ethnicity - nationality - race

Originally posted by elenos Arghh! Not genetics again! You ask some good questions Traveller and some bloody awful ones. If you think those silly sods that make a religion out of genetic blood tests have all the answers then go and grovel with them. If you want some straight, no bull answers from intelligent people on the ground then ask us!

Traveller,

I agree with you Traveller, nations can only be defined by having a government according to the dictionaries. No good can come out of going on about the umpire's decision. That old chestnut came from the modern American Indian fight for "land rights". Indian tribes that never had anything to do with each other before came together and claimed to be an "Indian Nation". Don't knock them for it worked brilliantly.

They got heaps of money and some tribes instead of building an internal government and sharing the money for the good of the communities proceeded to build casinos and immediately forget about the relationships they first claimed. It goes to prove liberal fantasies get brownie points by twisting terms and mangling the meaning of words, but underneath it all is the desire for money.

As for asking a divided nation, whoa! You wave a flag underneath your every post, so I know where this is leading. You already have your opinions, don't you? If you want to talk about Pakistan then say so, but I have nothing to say.

Originally posted by calvo I hope these example clear some ideas in your mind.

Calvo said �Some 70,000 years ago, a reduced group of humans (some 200 to say the most) left Africa. They walked first to the Middle East, and then along the coast towards India, while another group ventured further along and eventually populated Australia.�

 And they all had injections of body changing genes along the way? Whether there was a (hypothetical) land bridge between India and Australia or not (Do these guys who say such things know anything about how oceans provide world weather patterns?) there were and still are an awful lot of other races inbetween, the long and the short and the tall, with a vast range of skin colors and hair that is frizzy, curly, straight.

How recent is your data?  What about the hobbits from the island of Flores in Indonesia? Researchers now link them to Lucy, the mother of all us Tarzans and Janes! A publicity stunt for Indonesia? No way, the Indonesian government has tried to close down the site. They don�t want anything to do with it.

Now (hypothetically) that makes a lot more sense. An inbetween race of dwarves capable of breeding with humans and non-humans alike immigrated upwards to add to the Northern human gene pool. On the way up they dallied with tribes that were humanlike but incapable of breeding with humans that were dying out due to lack of partners. You did say only a few thousand humans existed in Africa, but there could have been hordes of hobbits forced away from their place of origin by overcrowding.   

Edited by elenos - 04-Jul-2007 at 07:39

An interesting paper which suggests that there may have been archaic genetic elements passed from other human species to Sapiens.

The Zulu are an ethnic group, the single largest one in S. Africa. Shaka united a bunch of related tribes under the Zulu Empire, which is now defunct and part of S. Africa.

And i've always felt that Brits look more similar to Iberians than Finns, its all about the face. There again Brits are mutts, 70% Iberian, 30% Northern European on average, so like any other mixed people, its all in the eye of the beholder.

Shaka Zulu was the man who united many disparate but related tribes under his rule, creating the Zulu Empire, thus uniting the people who were as good as the same ethnicity on cultural/linguistic grounds under a common nation.

As a rough round off, based on what i know of the last UK census, 3% ticked Asian, 3% Black, and 3% 'mixed' (which could be just about anything).

Re blood tests and fraud, are you refering to those companies that sell 'ethnicity' testers? Some of them inevitably are frauds, they want to make money first and foremost.
The science itself is fine and developing all the time, more importantly its testable to an extent the old fashioned 19th century approach wasn't. And very usefull, not just as an indicator of relatedness through ancestry, but provides clues about pre-historical migrational trends. Its used everwhere from archeology to forensic criminology.
Steer cleer of media sensationalism, like the BBC's 'Viking gene' a few years ago, as its just that, sensationalism to whip up interest in what was otherwise a very borring attemopt to find out if any Scots had much Norwegian ancestry, suprise suprise, yes, some of them did, like we didn't know this already.

You adding up to non-related sets of figures.

And the blood test thing was brought up by elenos.

Originally posted by Cywr You adding up to non-related sets of figures.